1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to tissue-supporting medical devices, and more particularly to expandable, non-removable devices that are implanted within a bodily lumen of a living animal or human to support the organ and maintain patency, and that can deliver a beneficial agent to the intervention site.
2. Summary of the Related Art
In the past, permanent or biodegradable devices have been developed for implantation within a body passageway to maintain patency of the passageway. These devices are typically introduced percutaneously, and transported transluminally until positioned at a desired location. These devices are then expanded either mechanically, such as by the expansion of a mandrel or balloon positioned inside the device, or expand themselves by releasing stored energy upon actuation within the body. Once expanded within the lumen, these devices, called stents, become encapsulated within the body tissue and remain a permanent implant.
Known stent designs include monofilament wire coil stents (U.S. Pat. No. 4,969,458); welded metal cages (U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,733,665 and 4,776,337); and, most prominently, thin-walled metal cylinders with axial slots formed around the circumference (U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,733,665, 4,739,762, and 4,776,337). Known construction materials for use in stents include polymers, organic fabrics and biocompatible metals, such as, stainless steel, gold, silver, tantalum, titanium, and shape memory alloys such as Nitinol.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,733,665, 4,739,762, and 4,776,337 disclose expandable and deformable interluminal vascular grafts in the form of thin-walled tubular members with axial slots allowing the members to be expanded radially outwardly into contact with a body passageway. After insertion, the tubular members are mechanically expanded beyond their elastic limit and thus permanently fixed within the body. The force required to expand these tubular stents is proportional to the thickness of the wall material in a radial direction. To keep expansion forces within acceptable levels for use within the body (e.g., 5–10 atm), these designs must use very thin-walled materials (e.g., stainless steel tubing with 0.0025 inch thick walls). However, materials this thin are not visible on conventional fluoroscopic and x-ray equipment and it is therefore difficult to place the stents accurately or to find and retrieve stents that subsequently become dislodged and lost in the circulatory system.
Further, many of these thin-walled tubular stent designs employ networks of long, slender struts whose width in a circumferential direction is two or more times greater than their thickness in a radial direction. When expanded, these struts are frequently unstable, that is, they display a tendency to buckle, with individual struts twisting out of plane. Excessive protrusion of these twisted struts into the bloodstream has been observed to increase turbulence, and thus encourage thrombosis. Additional procedures have often been required to attempt to correct this problem of buckled struts. For example, after initial stent implantation is determined to have caused buckling of struts, a second, high-pressure balloon (e.g., 12 to 18 atm) would be used to attempt to drive the twisted struts further into the lumen wall. These secondary procedures can be dangerous to the patient due to the risk of collateral damage to the lumen wall.
Many of the known stents display a large elastic recovery, known in the field as “recoil,” after expansion inside a lumen. Large recoil necessitates over-expansion of the stent during implantation to achieve the desired final diameter. Over-expansion is potentially destructive to the lumen tissue. Known stents of the type described above experience recoil of up to about 6 to 12% from maximum expansion.
Large recoil also makes it very difficult to securely crimp most known stents onto delivery catheter balloons. As a result, slippage of stents on balloons during interlumenal transportation, final positioning, and implantation has been an ongoing problem. Many ancillary stent securing devices and techniques have been advanced to attempt to compensate for this basic design problem. Some of the stent securing devices include collars and sleeves used to secure the stent onto the balloon.
Another problem with known stent designs is non-uniformity in the geometry of the expanded stent. Non-uniform expansion can lead to non-uniform coverage of the lumen wall creating gaps in coverage and inadequate lumen support. Further, over expansion in some regions or cells of the stent can lead to excessive material strain and even failure of stent features. This problem is potentially worse in low expansion force stents having smaller feature widths and thicknesses in which manufacturing variations become proportionately more significant. In addition, a typical delivery catheter for use in expanding a stent includes a balloon folded into a compact shape for catheter insertion. The balloon is expanded by fluid pressure to unfold the balloon and deploy the stent. This process of unfolding the balloon causes uneven stresses to be applied to the stent during expansion of the balloon due to the folds causing the problem non-uniform stent expansion.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,545,210 discloses a thin-walled tubular stent geometrically similar to those discussed above, but constructed of a nickel-titanium shape memory alloy (“Nitinol”). This design permits the use of cylinders with thicker walls by making use of the lower yield stress and lower elastic modulus of martensitic phase Nitinol alloys. The expansion force required to expand a Nitinol stent is less than that of comparable thickness stainless steel stents of a conventional design. However, the “recoil” problem after expansion is significantly greater with Nitinol than with other materials. For example, recoil of a typical design Nitinol stent is about 9%. Nitinol is also more expensive, and more difficult to fabricate and machine than other stent materials, such as stainless steel.
All of the above stents share a critical design property: in each design, the features that undergo permanent deformation during stent expansion are prismatic, i.e., the cross sections of these features remain constant or change very gradually along their entire active length. To a first approximation, such features deform under transverse stress as simple beams with fixed or guided ends: essentially, the features act as a leaf springs. These leaf spring like structures are ideally suited to providing large amounts of elastic deformation before permanent deformation commences. This is exactly the opposite of ideal stent behavior. Further, the force required to deflect prismatic stent struts in the circumferential direction during stent expansion is proportional to the square of the width of the strut in the circumferential direction. Expansion forces thus increase rapidly with strut width in the above stent designs. Typical expansion pressures required to expand known stents are between about 5 and 10 atmospheres. These forces can cause substantial damage to tissue if misapplied.
In addition to the above-mentioned risks to a patient, restenosis is a major complication which can arise following the implantation of stents, using stent devices such as those described above, and other vascular interventions such as angioplasty. Simply defined, restenosis is a wound healing process that reduces the vessel lumen diameter by scar tissue formation and which may ultimately result in reocclusion of the lumen. Despite the introduction of improved surgical techniques, devices and pharmaceutical agents, the overall restenosis rate is still reported in the range of 25% to 50% within six to twelve months after an angioplasty procedure. To correct this problem, additional revascularization procedures are frequently required, thereby increasing trauma and risk to the patient.
Several techniques under development to address the problem of restenosis are irradiation of the injury site and the use of stents to deliver a variety of beneficial or pharmaceutical agents to the traumatized vessel lumen. In the latter case, a stent is frequently surface-coated with a beneficial agent (often a drug-impregnated polymer) and implanted at the angioplasty site. Alternatively, an external drug-impregnated polymer sheath is mounted over the stent and co-deployed in the vessel. In either case, it has proven difficult to deliver a sufficient amount of beneficial agent to the trauma site so as to satisfactorily prevent the growth of scar tissue and thereby reduce the likelihood of restenosis. Even with relatively thick coatings of the beneficial agent or sheaths of increased thickness surrounding the stents, restenosis has been found to occur. Furthermore, increasing the effective stent thickness (e.g., by providing increased coatings of the beneficial agent) is undesirable for a number of reasons, including increased trauma to the vessel lumen during implantation and reduced flow cross-section of the lumen after implantation. Moreover, coating thickness is one of several factors that affect the release kinetics of the beneficial agent, and limitations on thickness thereby limit the range of release rates, durations, and the like that can be achieved.